Shut Your Eyes
by CreatorsOfWorlds
Summary: The death and resurrection of Uchiha Izuna.


_A/N - It had to happen some day. Common sense, that is. Enjoy it.  
_

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_Disclaimer__ - Kishi owns him, them and that. Sigh._

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_**Shut your eyes**_

_**o**_

_Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.  
_

_- Thomas Moore_

**_o_**

Uchiha Izuna was blind.

When it became necessary, Uchiha Izuna was also deaf, dumb or half-crippled, but over the years and as he'd refined his techniques, he'd found that blindness was really the most useful disability when it came to any mission. As a man with two good eyes, he'd be treated as a potential threat and an enemy worth respecting, but if he tied a bandage over his eyes and hunched over a little, feeling over the ground with his cane, he'd be able to get within two feet of the Shogun and stab him in the back before making his escape, all while avoiding the suspicion of being anything but an innocent bystander.

He'd once gotten within five minutes and six feet of proving that statement, before a discretely waved hand and a few muttered words had let him know that the contract had been called off. Izuna still looked back at that incident with regret. All it had cost Madara was a paltry sum of money, but it had cost him the thrill of a job well done and a good deal of personal and professional satisfaction.

It had all been made so much easier by the rumors which had begun after Izuna had given Madara his eyes. The ones which whispered that the Uchiha leader had stolen his brother's eyes had amused Izuna when he'd first heard them - really, did their enemies think that a perfectly healthy shinobi such as himself would have been unable to defend himself against the pain-filled wreck that Madara had become? Because if so, there was a rudimentary skill that Izuna would have liked to introduce them to that was called _dodging._

Still, suppositions like that were useful, and Izuna carefully fanned the flames with everything at his disposal, a hint here, a story from somebody who had _known _somebody who had seen it themselves there. Such a rumor played to both of their powers - because Madara became more powerful the more their enemies feared him, and Izuna - Izuna became more powerful the less their enemies feared him. Madara fumed about it, but he knew better than to argue with Izuna about the matters which were under his direct authority. His little brother had always been impossible to dissuade once he'd set his mind on something. And recently, he'd found himself unable to refuse Izuna anything.

After that, so Izuna thought to himself, it had really simply become a matter of testing the incredulity of his audience.

Apparently, it had no bounds. Izuna was considering writing a scientific paper on the subject, and sending it cross-country for Senju Tobirama's inspection and approval - it was a shame that their Clans were mortal enemies, because the Senju was the only shinobi outside his Clan whom he'd had a decent conversation with that lasted beyond five minutes, and hadn't been intended simply to facilitate an assassination.

For example, to begin with Izuna carefully inserted into the round of wagging tongues the idea that he himself had remained blind after the eye-snatching incident. This was immediately lapped up, despite the fact that the Uchiha Clan had several skilled medics of their own, (and had been known to quite shamelessly borrow the medics of the Senju in the past, whenever the aforesaid Clan's irrepressible good will got the better of them), and the fact that due to the constant state of war the Uchiha lived in, organ donors, i.e, fresh corpses, while a regrettable fact of life, were nevertheless also an inescapable part of it.

"How many men do they think we have?" Izuna muttered to himself while scanning a report one of his men had brought him. "The Uchiha have the most famous doujutsu in the known world." He considered for a moment and then added, "No matter what the Hyuuga say. Shockingly enough, in battle our enemies tend to aim for our _eyes_. Do they think I'm the only Uchiha to lose my eyesight since the Clan was founded? If we didn't recycle the eyes of our dead shinobi, we'd be losing twice the number of men."

He tossed the report aside with a sigh. "Another battle won - and another Clan unaware of the fact that the Uchiha possess the most skilled eye surgeons in the Five Nations."

Gods, their medics were going to hate him.

Emboldened by his success, Izuna next carefully suggested the idea that, despite his regrettably, _permanently _blind status, he still insisted on staggering out onto the battlefield every day. He left the _reasons _for this questionable strategy up to the imaginations of the men and women who heard it - probably they'd fill the gap in the story by attributing some kind of samurai-like noble idiocy to him, the kind where you ended up very brave and very stupid and also very dead.

He felt almost insulted when his prediction came true. Of course, he'd worked to downplay his own reputation as hard as he'd worked to enhance Madara's, but still. Shinobi might have no honor, but they did have pride, and his was becoming slightly bruised by how easy it was for everyone from old enemies (i.e, the Senju), to potential clients to accept that Izuna would have been crazy enough to march out onto the field blind (presuming that some kind relation had turned him in the right direction).

"They've _seen _the kind of hell even a simple skirmish can turn into!" Izuna gestured wildly to the blank walls of his tent, whom he had found very sympathetic and willing to listen on occasion. "The stench, the noise, the mud and blood and slippery footing - how the hell could a genuinely blind man last five minutes out there?"

He seriously hoped that Tobirama was maintaining a healthy skepticism about the stories he was hearing. Izuna wanted badly to retain some amount of respect for the Senju. After all, his only friend outside the Clan had been a victim of Izuna's 'blindness' even before the rumors had started. Izuna had used the advantage it had given him to shoot Tobirama in the back the first time they'd met in battle.

Izuna next decided to kill himself.

It was a well-thought out decision, and for once he'd discussed it with his older brother, who was, after all, his Clan leader, and did, as he reminded Izuna every chance he got, like to have more information on his younger brother's activities than a biweekly report which told him everything that Izuna had done _after _the fact. Izuna agreed with Madara every time he brought the matter up, and refrained from pointing out that his beloved big brother was an idiot and that sometimes it was _necessary _for him to be unaware of Izuna's counter-strategies in order for them to take effect.

If it was easy enough for the world to picture him wobbling heroically out onto the battlefield, facing in every direction but the right one and with flying shuriken and kunai knives missing him miraculously by inches, Izuna thought sourly, it should be easy enough for them to accept that one of those knives had actually hit him. Also, it would quiet Tobirama's suspicions a little. Izuna was willing to bet that he would have been talking Hashirama's ear off trying to convince him that the rumors of Izuna's disability were false.

Izuna smiled fondly. Outthinking and infuriating Tobirama had to be one of his favorite past-times, besides training with Madara.

Of course, there was the slight problem of getting everyone to believe that Izuna was dead while he was still very much alive and still carrying out his duty in plain view - but Izuna had found over the years that there were two beautiful truths about his job which made it a lot easier. One, shinobi tended to not actually be in plain view except when two idiotic lords decided to smash them together in an all-out battle. Two, to members of other Clans, all Uchiha tended to look alike.

Izuna made a policy of not being offended by the last. After all, he had a hard time telling any of the Senju apart, other than Tobirama and his elder brother. And show him one Nara and he'd seen them all - high ponytail, supercilious glare and a bunch of shadows. People who looked at the Uchiha tended to notice only three things - pale skin, dark hair, and the famous Sharingan.

If Izuna wanted to be dead, he could easily die. A corpse for a mock funeral would be all too easy a thing to produce. Very few outside his Clan had ever seen his face well and long enough to remember it, and if someone who looked like him was glimpsed, well… that was what family resemblances were for. In fact, he could probably even continue to use his favorite 'helpless blind or crippled Uchiha on the edge of battle, come and get me' tactic - after all, if one Uchiha was stupid enough to stroll into battle while missing one or two vital senses, why not another?

No, it was almost fail proof. Ninety percent of it, anyway, and Madara could take care of the remaining ten percent with a few well-placed glares and bitter rants. Izuna had often told his older brother that he had missed a shining career as a kabuki player. And just as often dodged a swipe from Madara's war fan.

The news traveled swiftly through the Clans and Lands. Madara's name became even more reviled, while Izuna's obtained something of a saint-like quality which deeply disturbed him.

"I hate being right," the young Uchiha said despondently to the walls of his tent a month later.

They preserved a sympathetic silence.

"I mean, I love being right, but this is destroying my faith in human nature."

The walls were understandingly quiet again.

"Not that I had much to begin with," Izuna added, and got back to work.

The spymaster of the Uchiha Clan found that he enjoyed being dead. It was nice to, after achieving a certain level of notoriety, retreat back to merely being another nameless shinobi. Restful. Izuna even had one or two of his opponents throw the 'who are you' question at him before they died, something that hadn't occurred with any predictable consistency since he'd been twelve.

Which was why he was so annoyed with Madara when the Uchiha drew up an alliance with the Senju only a short time later. Oh, he backed up his older brother's decision to the hilt - like most of the Clan, he could see the sense in the two most powerful groups of ninja joining together, even if the 'village' idea was dubious - but forget the political expediency of the thing for once, he'd been having _fun_.

"You haven't sulked this much since the time you nearly got to kill the Shogun," Madara remarked dryly, a week after he'd first brought up the idea.

"I am not sulking," Izuna said with dignity. "I'm simply mourning the loss of my anonymity. It is, after all, the source of a certain amount of pride to a ninja."

"You could stay dead," his older brother suggested without much conviction.

Izuna shook his head. "Too awkward. It sounds like we're going to be working hand in glove with our new best friends." He sighed. "Oh well. At least I can stay blind."

"So I'm still going to be an unnatural monster?" Madara asked irritably.

Izuna patted him on the shoulder. "Oh, oniisan. You were always that."

He dodged another swipe from his brother's war fan. "The first sign of an instable mind is an inability to control its temper," he observed serenely, and left to prepare for the meeting with the Senju.

He chose a length of fine gauze stolen from one of their medic's supplies (he really was expecting some sort of attempt on his life from them any day now) to bind around his eyes rather than his usual ragged piece of cloth. It was sheer enough to see through, but a minor henge changed that - at least, to the eyes of anyone observing it. Izuna had found that while people themselves were almost obsessively checked for henges, objects almost never were.

Clothes, however, were a different matter. Izuna shook his head as he looked over his meager selection and eventually just went with the least threadbare of them. The Uchiha had never been as rich as they were proud, and recent years had depleted their resources even more. Not that Oniisan wasn't a conscientious leader of the Clan, but he tended to consider almost _anything _else of more importance than what his men were actually wearing. As long as their fatigues still had three stitches holding them together and a place to display the Uchiha crest, he would see no need to replace anything.

Well, they'd consistently beat the Senju fifty percent of the time wearing those same fatigues, so hopefully no socially awkward comments would be made.

Humming, Izuna scooped up his cane - a perfectly innocent aid to his faltering steps which doubled as a sword when it was twisted apart - and headed out of his tent.

Time for his resurrection.

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_Reviews will be loved._


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